


Lilac Luxe

by chuusei_teki_na_koe



Series: Lightposts [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Angst and Feels, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Suicide Attempt, mentions of sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25668241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuusei_teki_na_koe/pseuds/chuusei_teki_na_koe
Summary: If Ann was going to come over to his apartment uninvited, she could at least have the consideration not to do it right when Goro was in the middle of trying to kill himself. Honestly.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Takamaki Ann, Background Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Mentioned Shido Masayoshi/Akechi Goro, background Suzui Shiho/Takamaki Ann
Series: Lightposts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1861186
Comments: 33
Kudos: 250





	Lilac Luxe

Goro spent a stupidly long time standing in front of the water heater, debating on the specific temperature of the water.

He'd initially figured maybe cold would distract him from the pain, but he didn't trust his ability to stay in a cold bath for any length of time. So then regular bath temperature? But it seemed weird for it to be too comfortable. Thematically off. He honestly would prefer something a little more violent and dramatic, but after some deliberating, this seemed like the best way to go. And well, call it a family tradition.

This would have been so much easier if Akira hadn't confiscated the damn gun from him.

He sat on the edge of the tub and turned on the water, then just watched the tub fill for a while.

He decided to leave his clothes on; it would be weird to sit in there with clothes, but weirder for his body to be found naked. So he just rolled up the sleeves of his collared shirt and ran a knife up one forearm a few times—up the street and not across the alley, as they say. He'd been injured enough in the Metaverse that he wasn't even slightly squeamish about doing it.

He did hesitate a long while before getting into the tub, however. Maybe it was just the idea of getting in with his clothes on. Ugh, this was so _mundane._ Couldn't he have been shot in the back by one of Shido's men, or fallen in some dramatic battle? Or dying heroically to save the world. That would also have been acceptable. There had been _so_ many opportunities to die that had been better than this, alone in his apartment bathroom. He just stared at the blood dripping, and weirdly, that made him nostalgic. He hadn't bled like this in years. He kind of missed it.

He was wondering if he should do the other arm too, or if maybe these cuts were too shallow, when, of all times, the doorbell just _had_ to ring.

Annoyed, Goro ignored it for a while. He'd just pretend not to be home. But he didn't get in the bath, figuring he'd just wait until whoever it was went away. But they rang a second time, and a third, and then there was a persistent knocking on his door, and _then_ his phone started buzzing, rattling its way off the edge of the bathroom sink where he'd left it. And then it just kept on buzzing.

He tried to ignore it. But the phone buzzed, and the door knocked, and so Goro was forced to grab a wad of toilet paper so he didn't get blood all over his shirt and press it against his forearm so he could answer the damn phone.

He looked at the display. _Ann Takamaki._ He clicked his tongue.

“What?” he answered the call. “I'm busy. Come later.” She could come all she wanted once he was dead.

“No, you're not. And I brought snacks!”

“Go away.”

“Let me in, or I'm picking the lock. Akira taught me how just recently, you know. I was surprised how easy it was! And there's this whole thing where you can just do it with couple of bobby pins! So you don't even need lockpicks or anything.”

With a long, aggrieved sigh, Goro said, “Fine. Hold on,” and hung up, then cast about the bathroom for something to stop himself from bleeding everywhere. He pulled a bunch of bandages out of the first aid kit and wrapped his forearm with experienced precision—he'd done it about a million times as a teenager—then rolled his sleeve down to hide it. His phone started buzzing at him again at some point during the process—“damn, woman, have some patience,” he grumbled, finally coming out of the bathroom to go answer the front door.

“Finally!” Ann said as she stepped in. Her arms were full of all sorts of bags of various shapes—some looked like they were from sweets shops, others from clothes shops, and one bag looked like takeout, and she dumped them all in his doorway as she slid off her shoes and came in.

Quite trivially, the first thing he noticed about her was her hair—she'd abandoned the girlish pigtails of her teen years, and these days she was experimenting with various sorts of updos. _I want to look like a classy, dangerous lady!_ she'd said, and he wasn't sure he'd call her _classy,_ and she was _dangerous_ for other reasons, but it was kind of nice. She'd really gone ham with the eye makeup that day, too—she'd probably gone to the department store and gotten herself a bunch of free makeup from the clerk. It wasn't the first time she'd done that. She had this particularly dramatic shade of lilac eyeshadow on that she didn't normally wear. Goro wouldn't say so unless she prodded him about it, but he thought it looked good on her.

“Why are you here?” Goro asked. He'd already resigned himself to her presence. “You could have just asked beforehand.”

“But if I asked beforehand, you'd say no,” she lifted a finger at him with a bright smile, and then went into one of her bags to pull out a green-wrapped box. “My friend got these souvenirs from Hiroshima! Maple manjuu? I know you like maple!” And she shoved the box at him, forcing him to accept it, while she shoveled through all her other stuff. “Never mind this, I just got distracted shopping on the way, but here!” she shoved a plastic bag at him that, by the smell, was Chinese takeout. Ann was just as bad a cook as he was, and practically lived on delivery. It was a huge waste of money, but well, her parents were loaded.

Goro just sighed and accepted the bag, taking it to the kitchen. It wasn't the first, second, or third time that Ann had done this.

When he and Akira had started dating officially, sometime after Akira had begun attending the same university as him, Goro had insisted that they keep it a secret from his friends. He just didn't want to deal with them. But Akira, kind, well-intentioned Akira, had nevertheless made his attempts to wriggle his friends into Goro's life. He would invite Goro to their get-togethers (which Goro always made sure to turn down, but Akira was often very convincing) and arrange coincidences where they would just happen to bump into each other, and find excuses to make them interact, and Goro couldn't escape every single one.

Goro did not get along with Akira's friends. Not one bit. Some of them, for obvious reasons. However, if pressed to say, the one he disliked the least was Ann.

Initially, he'd taken her kindness to be entirely fake. She'd been the first to just jump right in and suggest they go by first names, and then invite him out on a _shopping_ date, of all things, and then to a cafe, and then to the movies—to anyone watching, it would most certainly seem like the two of them were dating, and Goro had initially assumed that was her intent, but on their first date together, Ann had surreptitiously and solemnly whispered, “Don't worry, I have a girlfriend,” and upon realizing that Ann saw right through him, Goro was both irritated and mildly impressed.

And so their one-sided relationship continued.

Once, over coffee, Goro had asked her, “Why do you keep asking me to hang out with you?”

Ann, with a shocked expression, had replied, “Huh? Because we're friends,” as if it were the obvious answer. It seemed her definition of _friendship_ was a little different from the norm. He wondered just what her standard was.

When he'd happened to see her with her girlfriend, though, it had started to make sense. Ann was like a whirlwind, hitting more stores in one shopping trip than most people hit in a month, and Shiho, a more quiet and reserved type, scrambled to keep up with her. Maybe Goro should have inferred from her thief costume that she was just the type to take control of a relationship.

It was rather aggravating to put it in terms of her being in control of their relationship, but at this point, Goro couldn't deny the facts. Ann was here, in his apartment, at a time when he very much did not want her here, because she wanted to “hang out” with him, and he was forced to go along.

She'd brought some DVDs, too. When they watched movies, they basically always watched what she liked, which spanned from romantic chick flicks to action movies, but when she was the one bringing over takeout for him, Goro felt like he couldn't complain.

And so yet again, Goro was stuck sitting on the couch with Ann, watching some mildly entertaining drama about love and betrayal while the two of them shoveled down fried rice and vegetables in black bean sauce.

This one was actually fairly good, for once, and Goro wound up with his thoughts on the movie, so when Ann paused the movie and said, “Hold on, I gotta pee,” he didn't think twice about it until Ann returned from the bathroom with a sober look on her face, and Goro realized that he'd left the bathtub full of water and a bloody knife on the floor.

Whoops.

“Goro,” she said, and there were already tears welling in her eyes. “What were you doing in there?”

Goro considered himself an excellent liar, but there weren't really any lies for smoothing over the facts of this situation. “I feel like it goes without saying,” he said dryly.

What Goro wasn't expecting, though, was that she would burst fully into tears and just stand there bawling for an excruciatingly long amount of time. Goro felt extremely awkward. Should he comfort her? He wouldn't even know how to begin. He didn't like being around people crying. So he just sat there with his hands in his lap, a strained smile on his face.

“I'm—sorry, I'm—” And then she started apologizing between sobs, over and over, like she could hardly get out the words.

“You don't have to apologize,” Goro raised his hands, and then stood, feeling strange about being the only one sitting while she was standing. “It's nothing to do with you.”

“It _is!”_ she yelled, stomping her foot at the same time, and Goro jumped. “It _is_ my business! You're my friend! And—and—” and then she kept sobbing for a while longer, and Goro just stood there until she ran herself out.

Watching her cry, absolutely ruining her eye makeup, was weirdly nostalgic. The sight of smeared eyeshadow, of all things, was reminding him of his mother, and all the times he'd seen her with smeared eye makeup in the mornings, after she came back home from work, before she sent him off to school.

After she'd gotten control of herself, she went right up to him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shoved him down on the couch, then sat right next to him. “Tell me what happened.”

It was kind of hard to be snide to her after she'd just bawled for five minutes on his behalf. Or maybe it was just weird nostalgia getting to him. Goro leaned on the side of the couch and looked away. “Talking about it isn't going to change anything.”

“That's not true,” she said, and Goro was a bit startled by the absolute conviction in her voice. “Talking about it—that's how you figure it out. If you keep everything to yourself, you'll just make yourself suffer more.”

Goro looked at her, not sure how to reply, but she kept going.

“I'm not—I'm not saying I know everything, but...” she made a snot-sounding sniff, “look, my girlfriend, Shiho, when we were in high school, she...jumped off the school roof.”

Goro remembered an incident like that having happened at Shujin, but he hadn't realized that the girl in question was the same woman Ann was dating now. “Oh...was that because of Kamoshida?”

She nodded. “And...back then, we hardly talked about it. It was too hard. But having those hard conversations has made such a big difference. Having someone there to talk to. I _know_ that from experience.”

Goro looked away again. It felt really impossible to argue with her, as always. And she had him cornered. He sighed. “It's not like it's any one thing. It's not that simple.”

“Well then, start at the top,” she said, with a determined nod. “Top three reasons you tried to kill yourself.”

Hearing her say it so bluntly kind of made him wince. But as she'd said, she'd had these conversations before. As much as Goro had considered it, he'd never talked about it. Not even with Akira. _Especially_ not with Akira.

“Well,” he began, listing off on his fingers, “one, Akira is probably going to dump me, two, my father was just let out of prison, three, every day is torture and everything is meaningless.”

“That's a list, all right,” she said glumly. “Why do you think Akira is going to dump you?” She was not in the least surprised that the two of them were dating. Clearly, he hadn't been fooling her for an instant.

“Why _wouldn't_ he dump me?” Goro said bitterly. “That's a shorter list. I'm surprised you wouldn't support the idea of him dumping me.”

“Why would I support him dumping you?!” Ann said with sincere shock. “He talks about you all the time. He's crazy in love with you.”

Goro gave her an incredulous look. “I highly doubt that. He's just—” he waved a hand vaguely, “got this weird hero complex. He wants to save me, just like he saves everyone.”

“What? Is that what you think?!” Now she was the one giving him an incredulous look. “You want to know what he says about you? He's always gushing about how smart you are, how you're perceptive when it comes to people, you cut through the bullshit and get to the point, how you're fearless and willing to do anything, and—I could go on for hours. _He_ goes on for hours.”

He just couldn't quite believe it. He couldn't imagine Akira gushing about him. Goro leaned his chin on his fist. “Hmph.”

“Why do you think he's going to dump you? It would have to be something big,” she pushed, and now Goro was forced to give her the real answer.

“...He found out I still had that gun I got from Shido,” Goro admitted after a long silence. Eyes sliding over, he saw her nod and make a listening noise, prompting him to continue. He sighed, closing his eyes. “And he got me to admit I was keeping it in case I wanted to die. And then he took the gun from me.”

Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he saw her lashes lower. Her tears were drying, leaving her with a smeared and puffy face. “And you think he'll dump you for that?”

“...I think he'll dump me for saying I'm not going to a psychiatrist. And that's a perfectly fair judgment, on his part.”

Her gaze remained lowered on her lap. “I think it would really hurt him if you killed yourself. He'd never get over it.”

She was entirely right, and that stung deep. Goro kept his eyes fixed on the frozen screen of the movie in front of them. “Not like that's anything new. At least this would put an end to it,” he said bitterly.

There had been a time when Goro would have taken a sadistic pleasure in hurting Akira—but well, even then, it had been a double-edged sword. He'd felt all high when he was shooting that cognition in the head, but then he'd gone and puked up his guts afterward. If you'd asked him then what he felt, he wouldn't have even been able to tell you. All he'd been able to think was, _it's your fault, Akira Kurusu—everything._ Telling himself that had been the only way he could continue to live the way he had. There had been no other options.

But somewhere along the line, slowly, over the course of a solid year of on-and-off fucking and some emotional moments that had been _highly_ reluctant on his part, and then through two years of dating, Goro had stopped getting pleasure out of hurting him. These days, it just brought him regret. And as he got older, though he hadn't changed much in a real way, at least he had acquired a modicum of self-awareness. He knew he was bad for Akira. Being with him just hurt. But being without him would hurt worse.

“It would only be over for you. Not everyone else,” she said.

Goro looked at the floor. He already felt guilty about this, and he was mad that he felt guilty. Couldn't he even take his own life in peace? He should have done this years ago, before he'd gotten dragged down by any of this shit.

“Yeah yeah, I'm a bad person, I know,” he grumbled. “Can we move on?”

“It seems to me you've changed,” Ann said, but Goro didn't reply. Really, it was just that he didn't have the means anymore. That was all. He was still the same person he'd always been.

“What if you did get help?” she pressed.

“And tell them what?” Goro said with an eyeroll. “About all my magical adventures in another dimension as a superpowered hitman for the former prime minister? They'd lock me away in the loony bin.”

“I guess...you've got a point there...” Ann admitted with a groan, “But you can still talk to me! And to Akira! And I'm sure the others...”

“I'm not hanging out with the _Phantom Thieves,_ and it's incredibly cringey that you still call yourselves that, by the way. I'll never be part of your band of merry men, for _obvious reasons_ , and I wish Akira would stop trying.”

“How do you know that? You've never even tried. You avoid even being in the same room with any of us. Have you even _tried_ apologizing to Futaba or Haru?”

Goro's faced twisted in a particularly nasty scowl. He wasn't—he wasn't even sure if he was sorry. Was he? When he looked at Futaba, he mostly felt angry and jealous—jealous that she'd gone through all the same shit, and yet she'd come out of it _pure_ and lovable. Why the hell wasn't _she_ more angry and mean? Her whole existence was an accusation.

Or no, he knew the reason she hadn't become like that—because she had Sojiro Sakura. And Akira. And all the rest of them.

And yes, he could admit that her situation was quite objectively his fault. But he'd never even _meant_ to kill Wakaba Isshiki. That had been early on, before he'd known what the fuck he was doing or what his powers even did. Was he supposed to—admit guilt for this bullshit he'd been ordered to do without even knowing what it was?

He had enough to be guilty about. He was _not_ going to add this.

And yet, explaining that to the girl in question would be crass at best, and it would just make him sound like he was making excuses. What would even be the point? There wasn't. The only answer was to stay away from her. It wasn't like an apology would even change anything.

And Haru Okumura. Well, sorry to say, her daddy had been a piece of shit, and Goro didn't regret that one bit. What kind of desperate, pathetic, snivelling wreck did you have to be to want to brainwash daddy to crawl back to some broken version of him for a hug? Her father had been willing to sell her off to get raped, and she still wanted him back? Fucking disgusting.

Goro had visited Shido in prison, once.

The blubbering, the crying, the apologizing, it had all disgusted him. Shido had been transformed into a pile of mush with his father's face. It would have been better just to kill the bastard.

All of these were things he couldn't say out loud to Ann, because as disgusting as it was to admit to himself, he wanted her to like him. He didn't want to show her the morass of filth that oozed around inside him on a daily basis.

“Apologizing wouldn't change anything,” was all Goro said.

“Yes, it would! Don't be stupid!”

“I'm not going to do it. I don't want to be in the same room as either of them. That's the end of it.”

Ann did not seem satisfied with that answer. “I'm not even saying this for them. I'm saying it for _you._ It would help _you_ let go.”

“Let go of what?!” Goro snapped, turning to her. “ _Guilt?_ I hate to break it to you, but I don't feel guilty about anything. That's the kind of piece of shit I am. I'm a nasty, malicious, lying, angry killer. And _you_ should know that.”

Ann looked at him, her frown deepening. “You don't much look like a nasty killer now. You kind of look like a sad disaster gay.”

That shocked a slight wheeze of a chuckle out of Goro. “Touche.” Then he leaned his chin on his fist again, staring at the wall.

Ann was silent for a while before she asked, “So what's this stuff about your dad?”

“They let him out of prison for bullshit political reasons,” Goro said blandly. “Last I heard, he was going back to his parents' place up north.” He paused for a long while, and Ann didn't say anything, so Goro just kept going. “He called me, you know. Inviting me to come see him. Can you fucking believe that?”

“So...are you going to go?” she asked tentatively.

He snorted. “Of course not. For what? To listen to more of his bullshit grovelling? It's like some mind-controlling parasite has taken control of his body, he's not even the same person anymore. He used to be so _completely_ without remorse about anything—he could order a hit like he was ordering lunch.” He laughed. “He would never get his own hands dirty, of course, that was too dangerous, but I think he wanted to. He was always real rough with hostesses and hired girls, he got off on slapping them around, just like he did with me. He was always careful to spare the face, though...” He sighed.

Ann didn't say anything, so Goro's gaze slid over to see her eyes had gone round. Goro jerked his gaze away.

“He would always fuck me at work,” he babbled on, refusing to think about what he was saying. “I think the whole office environment did it for him, being in his suit while he's got me naked over the desk. I can't deny it did it for me, too. He was a sadistic piece of shit, but he knew how to make me cum. I mean, I hated it at first, but you just get used to it...”

Goro trailed off, staring at the wall again. What the fuck was he saying? He hadn't even said this shit to Akira, though maybe he kind of knew. It was kind of hard to admit that stuff to another guy. And he didn't want Akira thinking of him that way.

“Whatever, it doesn't matter—” Goro began, but he was cut off by Ann's arms around him, enveloping him in a crushingly tight hug.

“I'm sorry you had to go through that, Goro,” she said in a tight voice. “I'm so sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing for—” he began shoving at her shoulders, but he only made it halfway. He saw her face, lips in a trembling line and eyes squeezed shut, with that particular shade of lilac eye make up running all down her face, and this close, with the smell of her salon shampoo and whatever particular— _girl_ smell it was she had, he felt overwhelmed by that weird nostalgia again. Out of nowhere, he remembered something he thought he'd forgotten—

“ _This is my special eyeshadow, Goro,” she said, standing in front of the bathroom mirror as she patted around her eyes with one of those little Q-tip things. “It's called Lilac Luxe. I like to put it on when I need a little something special to cheer me up. Just having it on makes me smile.”_

She'd worn it practically every day, near the end.

“I'm sorry, Goro,” she said, bringing one hand up to pull his head down to her shoulder.

“It's not a big deal,” he muttered against her shoulder. “Why would I be bothered by something from...so long ago...”

He was breathing funny. He couldn't quite seem to push her away, and his eyes were stinging.

When was the last time he'd cried? He couldn't remember. He'd thought he couldn't anymore. He thought he'd grown out of it. Or maybe he was just incapable of it.

He tried to stop the sobs from coming, but it was like a force of nature ripping out of him, and after a solid couple minutes of rattling breaths against her shoulder, he started to sob in silent, painful jerks into her cardigan. Her hand against the back of his head was so warm, and he felt like a little kid again, small and pathetic and helpless, and he hated it but couldn't stop.

She didn't say anything, just holding him until he was done, and then some. Eventually, he pushed away and stood up, wiping his face with a sleeve as he turned to head over to the bathroom. “I should...drain that water, I'm sure it's all cold. And clean up the bathroom,” he muttered, embarrassed, and he was even more embarrassed when she followed him to come help.

Kneeling down on his bathroom floor, wiping off the dried blood drips on the floor with toilet paper together with Ann Takamaki, Goro felt profoundly pathetic and ashamed, but also, kind of relieved.

“Is that cut okay? Need me to check? You might need stitches,” she said as they flushed the toilet paper down the toilet.

“I'm fine,” Goro shook his head. “I'm used to bandaging wounds and suturing things on my own. This wasn't that bad.” He waved at her face. “But clean up your face already, your makeup is a disaster.”

She raised a hand to her face with a startled expression, like she'd forgotten about it. “Oh!” She turned to look at herself in the mirror. “You're right. Yikes.”

“I have some makeup remover in the cabinet,” he opened it to point at it, and then when she gave him a knowing look, said, “I just use concealer sometimes! It's not like I do that freaky drag stuff Akira likes!”

“Uh-huh,” she said with a smug look, pulling out some of his makeup sponges and the remover and going over her face with it. “I got it. You've never once gotten into mommy's makeup kit.”

Goro blushed, his mouth opening, then closing. “I was _eight years old._ ”

“An eight year old baby gay.”

“Oh, shut up,” he snapped, folding his arms. “You...lipstick lesbian.”

“How about I give you a makeover?” Ann suggested, completely ignoring his previous remark. “That always cheers me up.”

“...I'm not your _girlfriend._ ”

“You're pretty enough to look the part!” she said with a beaming smile, and Goro wasn't sure if he should be offended by that remark or not.

Of course, when Ann wanted to do something, there was no stopping her, so Goro wound up sitting on the couch with a bunch of half-eaten Chinese and a makeup bag dumped out on the table—Ann had conveniently just been on a shopping trip to buy just that, as Goro had suspected—while Ann sat in front of him, grabbing various parts of his face as she poked and daubed and puffed and pencilled.

“This is stupid,” Goro complained, quite uselessly.

But all Ann said in reply was, “Stop moving your face.”

When she was finally done, she shoved a hand mirror at him and said, “Look!” She wasn't even asking for an opinion, just giving an order. Typical.

He looked quite stupid, if he did say so himself. It wasn't as wild as some of the shit he'd seen Akira put on, but it was, well. Silly, on a man's face. She'd even used some of that bright lilac eyeshadow she'd clearly just bought.

“I look like a clown,” he said, returning the mirror to her.

“You're smiling, though,” she pointed out smugly. “So it worked. The makeover cheered you up.”

“Aha...” Goro looked away, eyes sliding over to the makeup strewn over the table. There was a particular little purplish bottle that stood out to him—he couldn't see the label, but he knew what it was.

_Just having it on makes me smile._


End file.
